She flailed for a suitable topic of conversation. Small talk wasn’t her thing. “So,” she managed eventually. “What kind of doctor are you, Dr. Angelo?”
“It’s Lucas,” he said. “And I’m an orthopedic surgeon.”
A surgeon. Of course he was. And orthopedics. Most of her knowledge of medicine came from TV and her first-aid training. But she knew that one from her dad. A smashed-up leg had meant they’d gotten some quality time with the orthopedics department. “That’s bones, right?”
“Bones and muscles,” Lucas said, steering the car around a bend in the road. “I specialize in sports medicine, mostly.”
Sports. Something else she knew little about. Her dad was a football fan. Her brother had been too. But Sara had never had much time for games involving teams and balls. Her teen obsession had been flying. That hadn’t changed. “Sounds, um, glamorous,” she managed.
Lucas laughed. “People are all the same on the operating table. But yes, I meet some interesting ones.”
“Is that why you have to get back to Manhattan? For a patient?” That would be a semi-reasonable excuse for undertaking this reckless trek through the elements.
“Yes. I have a shoulder to fix.”
“That doesn’t sound like an emergency.”
“The kid’s a figure skater. A pairs skater. His shoulder is important to him.” His tone sharpened a little.
“I understand,” she said. She didn’t, not really. Could a few hours really make a difference? Enough to risk driving through this weather for?
Lucas didn’t reply. Damn. Had she upset him? Dissed his specialty?
Way to go. She really had no chance of keeping him as a client. She couldn’t even manage to talk to the man without insulting him.
After all, it wasn’t like she could ask him about the operation or anything. She wasn’t fond of blood and guts, and surgery was all about that.
“I’m sure he’s in good hands,” she managed eventually.
“He is,” Lucas agreed.
O-kay. Well, he didn’t suffer from a lack of confidence, that was for sure. But she couldn’t fault him for that. She figured you needed to be confident in your skills to pick up a piece of razor-sharp metal and slice into someone and believe that you could put them back together again better than when you started. Just like she was confident that she could take someone up into the air in several tons of metal and bring them back down again in one piece. Some things you needed to know you were good at.
Pity that she was all too aware of the things she wasn’t good at tonight. Things like major storms and ridiculously hot men and small talk.
She wriggled a little against the leather seat.
“Are you cold?” he asked. He stretched his right hand toward the screen on the dashboard. It looked more complex than the instrument panels in the A-Star. And a lot more high-tech.
But he apparently was more than familiar with it, pressing the touch screen without really looking.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine.” The seats were heated and the car itself was warm enough, though she could feel the cold air outside from the chill emanating off the window. Far better to be inside the car than out, even factoring in the disconcerting company.
“Good,” he said. “But let me know if you are.” He nodded toward the dash and the display. “The temperature is dropping out there.”
“Odd to get a thunderstorm in winter,” Sara said. “Crazy weather.”
“According to science, crazy weather is going to be the new normal,” Lucas said seriously.
“Don’t say things like that to a pilot,” she said, only half joking. “I like nice calm weather.”
“You should become a pilot somewhere with a more temperate climate then,” Lucas said. “Find an island somewhere warm.”
“Tempting,” she said, trying not to picture Lucas in swim trunks lying on a tropical beach. “But I’m a New York kind of gal. I like the city. Staten is as island as I get.”
“Me, too,” Lucas said. “Though there are times when a tropical island seems appealing,” he added cryptically. He shifted down a gear to take a corner and another bolt of lightning cracked across the sky, giving Sara a better glimpse of the world outside. The trees lining the road were bending furiously in the wind. She shivered.
They drove on a little longer in silence, the road becoming all either of them focused on.
“So how did you become a helicopter pilot?” Lucas asked when they were safely back on a stretch of straight road and the rain had eased up.
“My dad’s a pilot. He used to take me up with him from when I was tiny,” Sara replied with a shrug. “I can’t remember ever not wanting to learn how to fly.”
For a moment she thought she saw him shiver but dismissed it. Overly confident gorgeous doctors didn’t do human things like shiver, after all.
“You never wanted to fly a plane?”
“Nah. Helicopters are more fun. Planes feel very … closed in. In a helo you’re closer to the sky.”
Another flash of lightning and the drumming on the roof bumped up a notch or two in volume. Right now the sky was a little too close for comfort.
“I guess,” Lucas said. He didn’t sound excited by the idea, either. “And is the Charles in Charles Air you or your dad?”
“Dad,” Sara said. She bit down on the desire to say more. About how it was meant to be her dad and her brother. Here in the dark little bubble of warmth of the car, it would be easy to relax and tell him all her troubles. About the exhaustion of trying to single-handedly run a business that needed at least two more people to function properly. Or dealing with a parent who wasn’t taking being out of action very well. Every time she saw her dad, even though he never said anything, Sara was sure he was regretting the fact that she was the one here to pick up the pieces instead of James. After all, sons were meant to be the heirs to the family business, weren’t they?
But James was dead and had been for six years now and there was nothing that either Sara or her father could do about that.
And tempting as it was to talk to Lucas as they drove through the darkness, she didn’t think crying on his shoulder was going to help keep his business. She bit her lip for a moment, pushing the bad stuff away again. She was aiming for Born and bred a pilot, not Can’t cut it. “Though really, it was my granddad. He flew a Sioux in Korea. That’s why Dad wanted to be a pilot.”
“Something in the blood, then.”
“I guess.”
“Have you always worked for your dad?”
She shook her head. “No, I did a tour in the army. I—watch out!”
Lucas swore and braked heavily. The car skidded but he steered into it like a pro and they came to a halt about a foot clear of the massive tree that lay across the road, blocking both lanes. Sara’s seat belt snapped her back against the seat.
“Fuck,” Lucas said. Sara could only agree with him, but she didn’t trust herself to speak just yet. She was too busy convincing herself that she was still in one piece.
He twisted toward her. “Are you okay?”
The sound of her heart beating was roaring in her ears but she wasn’t hurt. They hadn’t hit the tree. All was good. “Y-yes,” she managed.
His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?” He snapped his own belt free and leaned toward her.
She held him off with a hand. “I’m fine. But you need to move this car before someone else comes up behind us.”
“Shit. Yes. You’re right.” He straightened and pulled his seat belt back into place. He backed the car up and then swung it into a U-turn. “We need a safe place to stop. I can’t see what’s on the shoulder in all this rain.”
Sara couldn’t, either. The entire outdoors seemed to have turned into water sheeting from the sky. “I’m pretty sure I saw a motel sign a couple of miles back.”
“A motel?”
She waved back at the tree. “Well, we’re not getting past that. And while I’m sure this car has a fancy GPS th
at could get us onto some side roads, I’m guessing that there are only going to be more trees down. Same thing if we try to get back to Ellen’s.”
“I—”
“I know, you have to get back to the city. But it’s not worth dying for, is it? Let’s go to the motel and hope they have some rooms. You can get a few hours’ sleep and try again when it’s light. The emergency crews might have cleared this by then.”
She watched him think about it, his dark brows twisted in a scowl as he gazed out the windshield, and silently kissed her last hope of keeping his business good-bye. The tree was hardly her fault, but this night was turning into the kind of disaster that was guaranteed to make him wish he’d never heard of Charles Air. Or her. If he argued with her, she would politely ask him to take her back to the motel; then he could do whatever the hell he wanted. “I know this sounds like the start of every bad horror movie ever made, but the motel is our best option.”
His hands tightened on the wheel—her attempt at humor didn’t seem to have lightened the mood—but then he gave a single nod. “You’re right. This is too dangerous. We’ll try the motel.”
Chapter Three
The clerk manning the tiny reception area didn’t look like the type to have a dead mother stashed upstairs. He looked about twenty with a red baseball cap pulled down over dark hair and horn-rimmed hipster glasses looming large on his face. He was reading a photography magazine and listening to a static-interrupted weather station on the radio.
That seemed fairly sane.
More sane than her anyway. Lucas had put his hand on her arm to steady her as they climbed the front steps after dashing through the rain and her body had responded with a good old-fashioned flash of lust-delight-more-please that had left her half dizzy.
“Two rooms,” Lucas said.
The clerk pushed his glasses up his nose a little but didn’t lift his head. “Sorry, only one left.”
Damn it. Apparently they weren’t the only two riding out the storm. Only one room. Which meant sharing with Dr. Gorgeous.
Her body did that flash-of-lust thing again while her mind went a little crazy with images of her and Lucas together in the dark.
Not going to happen. Sara somehow managed to wrestle control of her brain back, telling herself that she was only reacting to him like this because of the adrenaline rush from their near miss with the tree. So time to stop giving in to inconvenient bodily chemical responses and actually think about the situation.
And whether it was a good one. After all, she didn’t exactly know Dr. Gorgeous very well, and they were in the middle of nowhere. She was able to take care of herself if she had to, but no point being dumb. The only problem was how to ask Lucas to prove himself the good guy that her gut insisted he was.
Just in case her gut was being deceived by her apparently easily-swayed-by-a-gorgeous-face hormones.
“Do you have a business card?” she asked Lucas as he pulled out his wallet to hand over a credit card.
He nodded. “Why?”
She looked at him a moment. “Because I don’t know you very well and we’re about to share a room for the night.” This made the clerk lift his head from the card details he was taking down and waggle his eyebrows at her. She shot him a look, and he ducked his head down again—but she could still see the grin on his face.
Lucas frowned, then his face cleared. “Oh. Right.” He pulled a couple of cards from his wallet then passed one to the clerk. “These are my details.” He hesitated a moment then handed over his driver’s license as well. “Take a copy of that, too, if you have a copier.” The clerk nodded and disappeared through a door behind the desk.
He handed the other business card to Sara. “Okay, text all that to someone you trust.” He nodded in the direction of the door. “That guy knows all my information, too, now. Can pick me out of a lineup if he has to.”
“Won’t help if you’re a crazed serial killer, you could just murder us both,” Sara said with a half smile, but she took the card and snapped a picture of it with her phone. Then she sent a hurried text to Viv, with the pic and a short explanation of where she was and why, and told her she’d check in by six a.m.
If Lucas wanted to get back to the city in the morning, they’d surely be up by then. Viv was ex-army, too. She’d raise all sorts of hell if Sara didn’t call her on time.
“I’m not a serial killer,” Lucas said. “And I promise, I’m not a creep, either. You’re perfectly safe.” He sounded serious, which was good.
She nodded then tucked the business card into her purse as the clerk came back with Lucas’s license. He passed it over, along with the key, and pointed them toward the room at the very end of the long, low building.
And, because there could be no other possibility, there was only one bed in the room. One bed that looked narrower than the queen size the information sheet on the bedside table proclaimed it to be.
It was the only piece of furniture in the room other than a single wooden chair that looked like it might collapse if anyone sat on it. There was a TV bolted to the wall on a kind of shelf thing, but that hardly counted as furniture. Neither did the two low square shelves on either side of the bed that she guessed were meant to serve as nightstands.
Lucas put his laptop bag on the floor. Sara put her bag on the chair and then opened it. Her uniform pants were half soaked from the dash from the car, and she kept spare clothes in there in case she ever got stranded.
“I’m going to change,” she said and slipped into the tiny bathroom, locking the door. When she emerged, Lucas was still standing by the door, studying the bed.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said.
Sara shook her head, regarding the carpet. It was a dull mottled beige shade and more than a little sticky underfoot. God only knew what might be lurking in those fibers. She wouldn’t have asked Dougal to sleep on that floor, let alone Lucas Angelo. She’d slept on hard dirt plenty of times but she didn’t think he was the kind who roughed it. Besides which, the motel carpet wasn’t covered in good clean dirt; it was kind of disgusting.
“We can share.” That woke up her hormones again, making her stomach tighten. She mentally smacked them back down.
Lucas looked at the bed. “Are you sure?”
Yes, said the hormones with enthusiasm. Stupid hormones. Even if they did share a bed, sleeping would be all that they would be doing.
She looked at Lucas, trying to see past the face to the man underneath. She’d done the smart thing back in the reception, and he’d taken no offense. He’d never treated her with anything but courtesy, he hadn’t thrown a tantrum when she’d told him she couldn’t fly him through the storm as some clients would have, and he was a surgeon who fixed teenage figure skaters, for Pete’s sake.
He didn’t set off her Spidey-sense in any way that wasn’t 100 percent good. And what with the army and working in the very male world of helicopters and life in general, she’d been around enough jerks to learn to trust her Spidey-sense when it came to detecting creeps.
True, her Spidey-sense hadn’t always gotten it right when it came to jerks, but that wasn’t an issue. She wasn’t planning to date Lucas Angelo.
Still, the fact that he did set off her Spidey-sense in the 100 percent good way made her question whether it was a good idea to climb onto a bed with him for a whole other set of reasons.
But there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. She was just going to have to be a big girl and ignore how hot the man was.
Having him in the back of her helo had been bad. But she was discovering that it was nothing compared with being stuck in a very small motel room with him on a bed that was also very small but looming very large in her consciousness.
Which was ridiculous. The man hadn’t done anything other than smile at her a little and hand over his details to strangers when she’d wanted proof he could be trusted. It didn’t matter if she was drowning in lust, because he quite clearly wasn’t.
Outside the world was sti
ll drowning in plain old rain. The rumbles of thunder made her shiver a little.
“Beer?” Lucas held out a bottle with another polite yet gorgeous smile. They’d found a six-pack in the trunk of the Mercedes when they’d been retrieving their bags. It had been chilled from the weather but was warming now in the overheated room.
“Okay.” Sara took it and twisted the top free. One beer. Which she would sip slowly. It would at least give her something to distract her from the fact that she was alone with Lucas Angelo.
She perched on one side of the bed and watched as Lucas removed his jacket, undid his bow tie, unbuttoned his collar, and took off his shoes and socks. Which left him in tuxedo pants and a glorious white shirt, tanned feet bare, looking like every female fantasy picture of a male movie star she’d ever seen.
She looked away as he took a seat on the far—not far enough, really—side of the bed. He sat propped against the wall and some pillows—the bed at least had a good supply of those—as he cracked open his beer.
Warm beer, the weird fan whistle of the motel’s heating, and the weight of a man lying on the bed beside her.
The first two she could cope with. The third was driving her a little crazy.
Which was ridiculous. Just a man, she told herself firmly. Just a man, just a man, just a man. And a client besides.
But try as her brain might, her body insisted on fighting back. Not just a man. A bona fide gorgeous man. A bona fide only-in-the-movies gorgeous man who smiled at her when he passed her a beer and who smelled like nothing on earth—warm and clean and male with that damned perfect cologne doing wicked things to her insides.
Who was just a few tiny short inches away from her, lying on the bed as he sipped his own warm beer.
Her heart was beating so fast, she was sure he must be able to hear it.
She was pretty sure that the sight of her, in the old black pants and KEEP CALM AND FLY ON T-shirt that she’d found stashed in her flight bag, wasn’t having the same effect on him.
Angel in Armani Page 3
